Great American Treasures : Women Preserving History Since 1891

Great American Treasures is a comprehensive survey of America's historic sites and buildings, their furnishings, and their gardens. America’s historic sites, homes, and public buildings are a living record of the diverse ethnicities that, over four centuries, helped to build a growing nation. Since 1891, the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America (NSCDA) has actively promoted our national heritage through historic preservation, restoration, and the interpretation of historic sites across the United States. In conjunction with NSCDA, in 2025 The Artist Book Foundation (TABF) published Great American Treasures, a comprehensive survey of the architecture, furnishings, and gardens that epitomize the nation’s diverse material culture over more than 400 years. The publication features the NSCDA’s collection of historic places, which span the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and highlights the residences of those who established themselves in America during this time. It features an array of buildings that speak to the diversity of traditions, people, and architecture in a growing nation—from English Georgian houses on the eastern seaboard to a French Colonial dwelling in Missouri and mission houses in Hawai’i. This survey illuminates the stories and material traditions of the wide range of individuals who contributed to the founding of the United States and to the development of America as a dynamic multicultural nation. Many of the sites tell the stories of familiar historic figures like George and Martha Washington, John Adams, James and Dolley Madison, John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and George Mason. Other sites offer the narratives of figures who contributed to America’s artistic heritage, such as John James Audubon and John Smibert, or those who helped to shape the country’s mercantile system, like Frederick Van Cortlandt and James Logan. Some places were designed by well-known architects such as Robert Mills or McKim, Mead & White, while most were the work of unknown or little-known architects, builders, joiners, and slave laborers. The classic architecture of these sites, their exquisite furnishings and lush gardens, and even the headstones in historic cemeteries all provide a window into the rich diversity of men, women, and children—free, indentured, and enslaved—who came together to build America.